"Good schools" are mostly about avoiding bad kids and bad parents. Expensive homes (without Section 8 or equivalent in the neighbourhood) is a feature, as it keeps most of them away. It's not a good way of doing it -- it excludes lots of perfectly good kids and parents and it is really expensive. It's just the best way available to most people in the West.
I'm not sure the opposite is true either, i.e. that expensive homes are a proxy for good schools. I've also worked in schools where the families were affluent, but the environment was toxic due to the behaviour of students and parents.
I went to school in a poor district. Pretty much all the students at my elementary school were poverty adjacent. Most of them were good kids, but that didnt really matter because the 10% who werent often ruined it for everyone else. This is a one bad apple spoils the bunch scenario, so the incentive is to make it as hard as possible for even 1 bad apple to be in the school. Of course there are plenty of bad apples among rich kids too, but as you can imagine the politics is different there.
It's also a feedback loop, once you're known for "good schools" then the homes become more expensive. If you don't care about moving then it's often cheaper to buy a home to send your kid to a good public school vs. sending them to private school.
The actual case is about whether the poor school system was allowed to have higher prop taxes than Texas allowed. In the details are the inequality argument (hence 4th amendment being at issue).
In my opinion state INCOME TAXES are the way to fund schools - lower prop taxes and make schools more equal - now everyone is happy (except those who want their 3M home to be in an exclusive school district).
There is a reason we don't send untold billions of dollars in aid to Africa anymore and the answer isn't racism. The same logic applies here.
There are also massive transfers involved (and the US has had them for at least twenty years) so the property taxes (in the US) have little to do with how much money schools have per pupil.
Private schools, even ones that receive less tuition per student than public schools of the same district prove this point because they can set a higher bar and more readily kick out disruptive students.
Nationally, per student cost at Catholic parochial schools is roughly 1/2 of public schools. (Couldn't find California specific numbers, but it tracks what I've seen.) That's cost/spending; tuition is even less. Special education programs eat up 1/4-1/3 of public school budgets, so there's still a gap after accounting for that.
1973 was over 50 years ago. Even the poorest, most "backward" states have long ago largely remediated spending inequities. What you hear today to support claims of inequity are cherry-picked esoteric cases to drive outrage, just like every other topic today. In reality there's clearly much more going on than what advocates for this or that would ever admit.
In any event, "picking your customers" is exactly the point of the previous poster(s). Money doesn't really explain what we're seeing. Once upon a time there was a very strong correlation, and people presumed causation, but now it's quite clear that the causation wasn't there. Certainly not directly, which is why throwing more money at the schools isn't helping.
Public schools have to take children that do not want to be there and make it everyone's problem, and their classmates suffer for it. Maybe this public school policy is the issue that should concern you.
Today in many liberal cities kids simply can't be suspended at all, period. In many other areas corporal punishment and suspensions continue to be used way too much. But actual results don't really track the way people assume they do one way or another.
What's the real difference between parochial schools and public schools? IMO it has little to do with policies or resources, but the fact that parochial schools demand parental engagement. It's often a prerequisite for admission. If the school knows the parent is engaged and working with the school, they'll often deal with behavioral problems that most public schools wouldn't or simply can't. By contrast, a friend of mine saw his entire public grammar school get shutdown by a self-identified radically progressive school board in Boston for failing to expel a kindergartner after a single incident (perpetrator, black boy; victim white girl; though really if anyone was paying attention the boy was arguably the victim, both by the ridiculous outrage, but also whatever was happening in his home life). This was at a school specifically created to mix rich white students with poor black students, and every family opted in to the experiment, and the school staff was simply following the gold-standard liberal policies the school was created for; policies which in this case were easily defensible, IMO. Its sad the way things went down, though the hypocrisy exposed was telling. People want to throw money at problems, virtue signal, and demand everybody else do something about these problems, only so long as they're not personally effected.
If the parent isn't engaged or can't be engaged, throwing more resources at the school won't help. If you want better outcomes, shift attention toward helping parents become more engaged. There are myriad ways to do that, and I really don't know what might help. But trying to fix the problem through school policies and resources isn't going to work. That avenue has been exhausted, though it still demands vigilance in maintaining appropriate resource distribution. Unfortunately, suggesting this kind of approach has categorically become a form of victim blaming--i.e. blaming parents for being poor.
I went to a catholic high school (not for the catholic part, but because it was a good school at a good price and nearby). Anyone with non-trivial behavior issues was kicked out very swiftly, so yes, they definitely turn away the inconvenient kids.
I don't understand your criticism. That 1973, the date of the case in question, is so old that we've solved school inequality?
Because we already know which children will be a drag on society by the time they're six or seven, right? And if we'd started doing this twenty-five years ago, we'd be much better off.
I propose intelligence/physical prowess tests for all children starting at age two or three, so we can start to weed out the dead weight much earlier.
And sterilizing the parents (as well as the kids -- but that goes without saying) will, in the medium term, address much of the tightness in the housing and job markets. It's a win-win!
And if a few decades is too long to wait for this, we could always go with summary executions, right? Or at least work camps for the inferior where they won't be a burden on society.
Sadly, all those "woke" pinko commies want to destroy our way of life by polluting our gene pool with the inferior stock, because they hate us and our free and equal society!
If you're going to say nothing can be done, then okay, the people who want something better will just move to live with each other in a community where this kind of problem doesn't exist, and do everything they can to keep it from following them. They can be happy that they have their standards, and you can be happy that you have yours.
So, by you are those the only two outcomes? Dump/warehouse disruptive kids and deny them any opportunity to become productive members of society before they even hit puberty, or let them run hog wild and burn down the schools?
I'd expect there's some middle ground here that doesn't include either giving up on children just because they're having socialization issues or putting those children in charge of the school.
Do I have all the answers? No. But if you're going to advocate for throwing away children because they misbehave, why stop there? That's not a rhetorical question.
If we're looking at things realistically, some of these children are violent. Yes, those should absolutely be removed and possibly locked in a facility if they can't be controlled. It's unfortunate, but the alternative is allowing everyone else to be harmed, for what exactly? Because you cannot face the reality that they are not going to suddenly turn into a saint and develop an interest in curing cancer when they grow up?
This is the definition of conservatism. It's not a problem as long as it's not your family suffering.
If you had a "problem child" you'd be singing a different tune about how acceptable it was to discard them.
I don't have a problem child. Neither do any of my neighbors. In fact it's apparently normal for 20% of my local school to test at the 99th percentile on state tests, and they're extremely polite. Weird. My wife's volunteering to lead our local girl scout troop and helps regularly at the school. It seems we're doing our part, so I'm really not sure what else you would like.
It's been a problem for literally millennia. This hardly unique to 21st century america.
Yes, I'm glad you don't have a "problem child". That's genuinely great, I wish everyone was that lucky.
What I would like, in the smallest possible way, is some shred of empathy for people who aren't as lucky as you are. Perhaps you could practice the concept of "walking a mile in another man's shoes" and make an attempt to understand what they're dealing with instead of dismissing them as inferior.
I'm also happy your wife is volunteering to help with girl scouts. I think that's a great thing and more people should do it.
But that doesn't excuse your lack of empathy.
Kids are not some kind of deterministic automatons where the same input always produces the same output (as if we could even reproduce the same inputs for an entire life). They're more complicated than that for reasons we frankly can't even understand.
There are a number of things that are highly correlated with producing a "good child", a major one being having enough money that the family isn't under constant stress and you can afford second (or third or fourth) chances.
But callously discarding every child who isn't lucky enough to benefit from this is just wrong. We, as a society, a culture, should be better than that.
Am I expecting you, personally, to go out and change the world? No, no more than I'm expecting myself to do it. But we all make small decisions every day and if enough of us make the "right ones" they can add up, and it starts with empathy for our fellow man.
We do our part, and we've decided to live in an area where others also do their part and try to build a community and a society, and not in an area where people tear down the community around them, or make excuses for those who do that. Again, what exactly are you chiding me for? What should I be doing differently? It's not us keeping them down. We're gone.
Are you familiar with the phrase "pulling up the ladder behind you"?
This isn't pulling the ladder up behind me. It's noticing a ladder, climbing out of a pit, and walking away. Ladder's still right there. Meanwhile others are asking why we don't try to make ourselves more comfortable in the pit.
I would argue that their outcomes in general would still be worse off then their lesser funded counterparts.
Anyways, I'm not taking the position that we shouldn't "remove" "problem children" in the same way I agree that prisons are necessary for society.
I guess if I had to summarize my feelings on this matter in this tiny little text box, it's that while this option should exist, we should all feel shame, a sense of failure, every time we have to exercise it.
We should ask ourselves, collectively, what we could have done differently to prevent the situation from coming to this point.
It's theoretically possible that there was nothing that could be done, but people are way to willing too just leap to that conclusion.
As an extension of that, we should at least pretend a modicum of empathy for our fellow humans. People are... people. They're complicated. Nobody is good or bad. They certainly do good things and bad things, and at some point, given our current society/technology/culture/understanding of the world, our best option might be to put them in prison for the rest of their life, but that doesn't mean we should be happy about it.
Like, I get it, you have a child, you have incredibly strong feelings about how to protect and nurture this child, both biologically/genetically as well as an ingrained cultural response. You want to do the best you possibly can for your child, even if it comes at the expense of everyone else's child.
But society improves when we raise the standards for everyone.
I'm not asking that this guy go out and sell all his possessions and march in the streets or whatever extreme example you want to think of. I'm certainly not doing that either. Just remember that "problem kids" are children just as much deserving of love and respect and help as your child.
Theoretical social causes and activism are great for university discussions and political sloganeering, but it's a whole different pair of sleeves than what's good for your family.
To which "theoretical social causes," "activism" and "political sloganeering" are you referring?
I'm genuinely confused by that, as I mentioned none of those things in my comment. Perhaps you replied to the wrong comment?
Rich parents' kids with drug habits or a sense of entitlement can be just as bad.
Have you ever met a rich kid with rich parents? Punishment is unlikely.
Increased spending doesn't matter if it goes into administrators who increase bureaucracy instead of teachers to keep them from quitting to be baristas, or to supplies and food for kids. Among many other systematic factors, accountability needs to be had for districts and even parents themselves.
0: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2026/school-s...
1: https://www.statista.com/chart/15434/the-countries-spending-...
2: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/education...
It doesn't really matter exactly what tax mechanism is used to fund public schools, the actual thing keeping a 3 million dollar home in an exclusive school district is that you have to be able to afford a 3 million dollar home in order to live in the boundaries of the district and send your kids to the school.
Are you referring to the stereotype of rich parents buying their kids out of trouble?
Refusing to discipline your child is hardly restricted to "the lower class".
I never said anything about lower class or wealth. Next time if you want to have a constructive discussion, discuss don’t leave your biased emotions putting words in others mouth.
This is not how you have a constructive discussion.
This is bigotry and prejudice with no factual basis.
Talk to any teacher in America, it’s one of the biggest problems today. It’s not class, or money but something got lost and parents expect schools to raise their children but at the same time will be deeply offended that the child they did not raise is misbehaving.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-state-level-perspective...
Rich parents spend hundreds of thousands a year to control for one factor: just to keep their "average" offspring away from noisy and distracting troublemakers whose parents can't get their life together enough to even do the basic parenting. You wouldn't throw your puppy into a pool of sharks, so why would you put your kid in a suboptimal and potentially dangerous place if you can afford otherwise?
If you are a parent working 2 dead end part time jobs to barely pay the bills and have no emotional nor physical energy to properly love your child: well, you're a "bad parent" in society's eyes. It's not your fault at all, but that's how you'll be seen.
(and then weirdly, when I leave, I'm "pulling the ladder up." Shouldn't it be good riddance to me? Since I'm wrong and simply bigoted, of course)
I think, believe, that having two parents is better than one parent for a child. In the same way that having some number of grand parents and aunts and uncles and other relatives is also probably better. More relatives, generally speaking, means access to more resources and more resources for children strongly correlates to being richer later in life.
I don't believe that having one "good" parent and one abusive parent is better than having just a single good parent.
Some kids don't get to have two loving parents. What is supposed to happen to them? It's certainly not their fault.
Like, I'm challenging your values here and your response is "well I'll just leave" and you act like this is what I want.
It's not what I want. I want people to care and more crucially do stuff for their community/society/culture/nation/whatever. I want people to work together to raise everyone's standard of living.
It's like building wheel chair ramps everywhere and then discovering that, hey, ramps are also really useful if you're trying to push a baby carriage or wheel some luggage around or even just move up a level with really bad knees.
I think I made it clear with my "we moved somewhere nice" that that's not what I'd like either. It's not a kid's fault that their family sucks. But it's not every other kid's fault either. Schools should do what they can to discipline these kids (generally, they don't). But they also need to still teach the kids who did have loving parents instead of spending all available resources on the kids who didn't, and likely this means separating groups of kids with different needs, which they are loath to do. But it absolutely is the parents' fault. Unless someone died or suffered an extreme random personality change, that includes single parents.
Drug abuse rates tend to be similar in such places, they just tend to use different ones and be able to afford them, at least for a while.
Same with other crimes where things like DUIs can have lawyers involved that "manage" the outcomes.
Have you heard of this fellow named donald trump?
> IME yes, upper middle class people are much less likely to let TV/video games raise their kids, are much less likely to be divorced/have multiple families
You have proof for this, of course? It's something that could easily be measured right?
I don't really feel like quoting a bunch of studies for something obvious, but yes. Go look at SES (or educational attainment as a proxy)'s relation to family structure and screen use policy. Lower income kids are far more likely to own a smartphone or spend more hours on screens, for example. Kids whose parents went to college are far more likely to have 2 married parents. And if you've lived around both groups you'll find this is kind of obvious.
Have the people in the west not considered letting parents send kids to a school that they pay for directly? Then people can self-sort. It seems like a really obvious solution to have a good school and a cheap school in the local area.
I understand this sort of thing is fantastic for social cohesion and has no negative consequences. (/s)
Everything turns to shit, but hey, the picket fences are white inside my gated HOA.
There are certain very basic standards that one segment wants to live with and normalize for their kids. If the other part aren't going to live up to them, you're never going to get social cohesion anyway. It isn't the people from the HOA community who are going to the ghetto and tagging it with graffiti or littering with used drug needles.
On the subject of children and what they are raised to learn and value, the country also happens to be allergic to instilling a common, non-toxic civic culture. It chants the pledge of allegiance before it's old enough to understand half the words like a prayer or a magical incantation, without ever taking the time to drill down or stand behind any of the values it purports.
PS. Drug use and abuse, shitty parenting, and poor family planning happens to a very significant degree in all communities in this country, but the consequences all those things cause are actively amplified for people living in the trailer park and on MLK way, while society bends over backwards to mitigate them for people living behind picket fences.
I see a lot of empty words around how I shouldn't identify poor behavior, but no suggestions for how we end it. "Break the cycle" okay how? Education is free and lower income areas generally have more school funding. We have programs for rent, utilities, food, medical care, and just straight cash.
How do we get people to value themselves and their families, much less something abstract like our republic? In this very thread there are people who are presumably somewhat wealthy saying e.g. divorce is fine.
Provide a bloody baseline. Every child deserves an environment they are given everything that a child needs to succeed, regardless of how fucked their home life is. The state can only control what happens outside of school so much, but it can control what happens in school.
It means transportation to and from school, or walkable access to them. It means school lunches. It means a space to work and study. It means a space that is safe and free from antisocial disruption. It means dealing with the antisocial disruption, through the counseling and support services children need.
You can't fix every broken human being, but you can not just abandon them after putting in minimal effort.
> Education is free and lower income areas generally have more school funding.
That delta is nowhere near enough, because the job of educating a child with an absolutely fucked home life is monumentally harder than one who doesn't have one. But it's necessary to do it, to work on the problem long-term.
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> How do we get people to value themselves and their families, much less something abstract like our republic?
Teach them to be a part of their community. Put them to meaningful work that improves it. This is huge for social cohesion, and every high-cohesion society or high-cohesion subculture in a low-cohesion society does it.
For a trivial example, Japanese students don't clean their classrooms because their schools are too cheap to hire janitors. There's no shortage of that kind of work that children can meaningfully do that improves them, their environment, and their town, and gives them a reason to give a shit about it.
Clubs are another. The level of support and funding for them dramatically falls short of where they should be. They should not be an optional activity largely available and patronized by the college-application-padding upper-middle-class. They are necessary for proper development.
You can also attack the problem from the other direction - doing less to actively create broken families and households. There's an incredible perception of unfairness in society, and reasonable people will treat it the same way that they feel it treats them.
Punishment is cheap and actually quite likely to work.
I think you maybe misunderstood previous poster? They were suggesting (unless I am the one misunderstanding) that families shouldn't be able to select a school based on how rich they are, which would accomplish a much more egalitarian society, the opposite result of what you suggest.
See for example schools in Finland, where you don't get this US-style outcome of the very rich sending kids to elite schools destined to be CxOs and the very poor having no choice but to go to mostly very bad schools.
https://www.techclass.com/resources/education-insights/are-t...